Exploring the Luminosity-Timescale Phase Space of Exploding Transients

"This project will explore explosive transients in the luminosity-timescale gaps within the Kasliwal Diagram, and also exploit much larger datasets in order to build up a fuller picture of the luminosity-timescale diagram of explosive transients, with the intention of studying a variety of poorly known phenomena. These phenomena range from faint and fast novae to some of the most luminous supernovae.
Initial focus will be on classical novae with high luminosities and fast declines within the M31 galaxy, which allows for large statistical samples of spectroscopically confirmed events. Statistical methods most commonly used on supernovae, will for the first time be used to probe these events.
Further to this, other transients will be investigated, namely the mysterious supernovae IIn class which have very differing properties and ambiguities related to Impostor events. These supernovae are likely misclassified with some being very bright core-collapse progenitors, some likely to be thermonuclear events interacting with the CSM, some probably having a progenitor on the very low end of the core-collapse mass scale and others being on the very high end, others are far from any star forming regions.
This project will focus on increasing the numbers of events within these poorly populated regions of the Kasliwal Diagram in order to apply statistical methods to probe the progenitors of a range of transient objects, both through observations of historic events, and through continuous monitoring for this phase space to increase the populations."